John thanks for eloquent reflection. Agree fully. on your last comment, while fear can be rational, I take your point that my answers were weak. I like the seven cases where fox and piexeto found evidence of real civic power achieving change.

Nancy. Yes. Collective amnesis is related and perhaps the greater problem but it’s a cousin of deciding not to engage in the first place.

I have learned to respect the ideas of the poor, not only because they are quite accurate in terms of the specific context, but more because they represent what people want to do. When we harness the energy of action, we are well on the way to engaging with change processes that might actually work. My objection to the term rational ignorance is that the rational choice of the poor is rarely, if ever, ignorant. The surfeit of information that encircles is just that. A surfeit of information. That people choose not to engage with this it is not a matter of ignorance. Rather it is a comment on the functional irrelevance of that information to the context. Let us not therefore ascribe ignorance to those that find little resonance with the information that abounds.

oops that’s Henry Giroux, not Marcel…

In a complex system, there is no right or wrong. There are choices that people make because that is what they do when confronted with their circumstances. I worked a water supply system on Lake Victoria where people were vandalizing their own recently installed clean water tap stands, reverting back to ditch water that they had to pay more for, that they knew made them ill. This was not ignorance; this was a choice. Our inquiry into the dynamics revealed that there were youth who stood to lose their jobs carrying water with the arrival of new tap stands. Moreover, the wider community agreed that these youth should be able to make money in this way, so there was no resistance to the vandalism.

There is a movement based change approach documented in our recent work, “Navigating Complexity in International Development” that we espouse. Rather than assume that there is a preferred change pathway through a complex system, understand that complexity means that there is no predictability, and that our engagement must therefore be iterative. Burns and I argue that, by building on the action based participation of people at the “point of pain” and those around them, we not only harness their context specific knowledge, but also their enthusiasm and energy.

Rational ignorance, as you put it, would imply a sense of obduracy among the poor that we need to overcome through better information and engagement. I would argue that it is the other way around. It is the expert outsider who needs enlightenment. The willful making of choices that experts define as ignorance is, in my experience, a perspicacity grounded in local understanding of the system patterns and attractors that exist. It is rational. Not ignorance.

That is not to say that there is no role for new knowledge. On the contrary, once we recognise that local choices are not ignorant, then we can offer new knowledge that might be useful. I have spent years working with profoundly competent agricultural producers who were facing profound context changes that were driving them towards poverty. Offering knowledge that they could pick through and mess about with create spaces for conversations that resulted in transformative action.

The good governance sense of accountability, transparency, participation and inclusion builds on the idea (I think) that everyone has something to offer. If we are careful in handling power that comes with a sense of agenda defined certainty, we can engage widely and stimulate change through the actions of many. Sadly though, these four principles are also used as a hammer to derail the agendas of other people less powerful than ourselves as evidenced by loan conditions that connect to the principles of liberal democracy.

So I do not agree that Rational Ignorance is a useful term applied to the poor. It merely casts those that think differently from experts are being obdurate. Perhaps it is time for expert led development to realize that it is us who are ignorant of most relevant dynamics.